New nForce Boards Previewed

Mmm. Goodies. by Space+cowboy · 2004-10-19 23:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

I *do* like the trend for passing computationally-expensive chores onto support chips rather than the CPU (ethernet checksums, firewalls, raid checksums etc.) but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.

If you look at a 3ware 9500 card, it'll cost ~£500 for an 8-port setup! Given that the N-force can support 8 drives (4 sata, 4 ata) in a single RAID image, it would have been nice to get the raid-5 as well as the -1 or -0 levels. You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!

I know I can run software RAID across the disks, but I'm still more comfortable with h/w solutions - I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard - losing oodles of data is a huge body blow, and when you have that enormous amount of data, even restoring from originals is a pain :-(

All I want is a single server with enough space and reliability to store all my DVD's and MP3's of CD's, is this too much to ask ? [grin]

Nevertheless, I'm pretty impressed with a stateful firewall implemented in hardware :-)

Simon.

--
Physicists get Hadrons!

Re:Mmm. Goodies. by swordboy · 2004-10-19 23:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!

Once again, a slashdotter forgets that he does not represent Joe User at which a product is targetted.

If you want RAID-5, then go buy your favorite PCI-Express RAID card and do it yourself. There is no since in making this more expensive for the 99.999% that won't be using it.

--

Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Re:Mmm. Goodies. by caluml · 2004-10-19 23:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard - losing oodles of data is a huge body blow
Rebuild your raid array, and restore from backup. You were making backups of the raided data, weren't you? Tell me an obviously bright fellow like yourself was.

There are two types of people: Those that have lost data, and those that will.

--
Get your own free personal location tracker
Re:Mmm. Goodies. by Algan · 2004-10-19 23:43 · Score: 3, Informative

...but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.

I was looking for something similar and I stumbled upon this one: http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket754/k8n-e_d/ overview.htm

Apparently it comes with an onboard Silicon Image SATA controller with 4 ports and the ability to do Raid 5. I'm seriously tempted to give it a try...

--
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Re:Mmm. Goodies. by Lumpy · 2004-10-20 00:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

raid-0 is not for your archival use.

Raid-0 is what I use for my pair of 250 gig drives for video capture. they are fast enough so that I do not get any frame drops when capturing from DV or from my Targa-3000 analog capture card (capturing at a measly 20Meg per second data rate.)

Raid-0 is for insane speed and temporary storage.

if you are looking for server class RAID solutions there are motherboard out there for you, but you will be paying that extra 500 for it.

It blows my mind the number of people that want server class hardware but refuse to pay for it.

"I want a $50.00 motherboard that support's 4 processors, 8 gig of ram, and has both untra 320 scsi RAID and SATA RAID! oh and put a geforce FX5900 on it, soundblaster audigy built in and 5 1000/100/10 erthernet ports on it!"

It will never happe, so stop looking for it.

if you want server class hardware then you have to buy server class hardware at server class prices.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Mmm. Goodies. by Noehre · 2004-10-20 02:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

The thing is, adding something like RAID5 to an existing RAID system would be trivial and vastly cheaper.

Look at something like nVidia's Soundstorm. The extra silicon on the chip for Soundstorm costs, what, a few dollars? Compare that to buying a seperate sound card for $50-150.

The fact that a market doesn't exist (or more likely not a big enough market) doesn't mean that it isn't possible or a lot cheaper.
Re:Mmm. Goodies. by bluesnowmonkey · 2004-10-20 02:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

It will never happe, so stop looking for it.

OF COURSE it will. Without a doubt. No question whatsoever. You sound pretty new to the industry for an expert on "server class hardware". It wasn't that long ago that the idea of hardware RAID-0 and 1 on a gaming-oriented board would have been considered ridiculous. It's just a matter of time now before RAID-5 gets thrown in there, too.

now i can finally... by Interfacer · 2004-10-19 23:24 · Score: 3, Funny

Get rid of my central heating system.
In order to heat up the house i just have to play DOOM3 at ultra high quality settings.

If they start supporting dual P4 extreme as well i can even add a water heater for the bathroom.

Thanks nvidia :)

Re:now i can finally... by Ford+Prefect · 2004-10-19 23:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

While this comment is rated funny, I would like to know how feasible it would be to actually use a high end CPU & mobo to heat a reasonable amount of water.

Processors tend to start overheating at around 60-70C (a guess), whereas water from a central heating boiler apparently runs at around 82C. To get any real heating done, you'd have to run the processor at a rather high temperature, and one which would likely badly damage sooner or later.

Plus, there's the issue of power output - a modern processor might kick out around 70 watts of heat, whereas a typical electric shower is around 5 kilowatts. You might get a slight trickle of warm water from your processor, but nothing much.

Personally, I wish manufacturers would pay more attention to power consumption of computers, as all that heat still has to be dissipated, even if it's not going to be an effective heater. I'd rather not have my PC whirring like a helicopter just to do some web browsing...

--
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Re:now i can finally... by sxpert · 2004-10-20 00:04 · Score: 2, Interesting

friend of mine uses it to heat the fishtank via a double heat exchanger (the fish don't like de-ionized water)

SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... by madprof · 2004-10-19 23:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

So what technology is going to be able to produce this sort of throughput from a harddrive?

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... by Phosphor3k · 2004-10-19 23:53 · Score: 2, Informative

Huge amounts of cache will let it burst fast enough to sometimes take advantage of it. There are 16mb cache sata drives on the market now. It's only a matter of time until drives come with a gig of cache.
Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... by John+Betonschaar · 2004-10-20 00:00 · Score: 4, Informative

It's only a matter of time until drives come with a gig of cache.

A gig of cache does't make any sense, unless you have a 100TB drive or something. Above a certain amount of cache (depending on the size of the memory that it caches), doubling the cache size only improves the cache hit/miss ratio by a single percent or so. I once knew the calculations that give the hit-miss ratio, but I forgot them. Anyways, it's just standard theory so you should be able to google it up.

Your sig is mine
Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... by madprof · 2004-10-20 00:14 · Score: 2, Informative

OK that's fine. So we've got a hard drive that has 16MB of cache with an interface that has a max throughput of 3Gb/s ... does it really matter?
We're talking about such a small amount of cache memory here. And to fill that cache will always require a very very slow disk read. Do we really get any significant performance increase?
There must be some sort of improvements in the works for the moving parts of a hard drive surely?
Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... by chemguru · 2004-10-20 03:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

Solid State Drives would be my guess. I'd venture to guess that data movement without "physical means" ( heads moving across a rotating platter ) would/could provide that amount of data transfer.

--
--Chemguru

Multiple reviews and news articles by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 23:33 · Score: 2, Informative

Collated at this site.

Disappointing Audio by DaHat · 2004-10-19 23:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'm more than a little disappointed again to hear that their SoundStorm system was left out again.

I for one love the audio coming out of my Asus A7N8X Deluxe.

I like many laughed at and bad mouthed embedded audio for years, until I heard and saw what this mobo could do. Now, I've got a single SPDIF cable running to my speakers.

nVidia has proven themselves as a strong player in the mobo chipset market, however the SoundStorm omission costs them dearly IMO.

--
Help Brendan pay off his student loans

Re:Disappointing Audio by Pyrion · 2004-10-19 23:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

IIRC nVidia sold SoundStorm to Creative Labs (this is hearsay, don't take my word for it). That's why after the nForce2 they stopped using SoundStorm. It was written off because nVidia figured "most people" didn't know how to use the onboard Dolby Digital decoder and the feature wasn't in high demand.

IMO they didn't even need an onboard Dolby Digital decoder. They could've shelved that and made a generic onboard sound system in hardware (rather than RealTek's ALC garbage that uses the CPU) to beat the crap out of RealTek and Creative Labs.

--
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Re:Disappointing Audio by Hieronymus+Howard · 2004-10-19 23:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

The nice thing about SoundStorm, and the reason I bought an nforce motherboard, was the Dolby Digital ENCODER. No-one else has that, not even Creative.

And the whole motherboard, including SoundStorm, was similarly priced to a Creative Soundblaster.

I'm totally pissed at Nvidia for omitting SoundStorm on the NForce 4.
Re:Disappointing Audio by Gentlewhisper · 2004-10-20 00:27 · Score: 4, Informative

"nVidia has proven themselves as a strong player in the mobo chipset market, however the SoundStorm omission costs them dearly IMO."

It's inclusion costs them even more dearly in terms of tangible dollars. According to some guy at 2cpu.com, each chipset with SoundStorm = almost $30 of licensing fees paid to Dolby Corporation.

Not very cheap considering the whole mobo sells for peanuts nowadays!

--
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Re:Disappointing Audio by Deathlizard · 2004-10-20 01:04 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've owned an NForce1 and 2 and honestly, the audio was one of the big reasons I bought into it. I Skipped on the NForce3 becasue of this and most likely I'm going to be skipping on the NForce4 as well.

At this point I'm hoping that NVidia makes a Soundstorm chip and sells it to manufactures the same way they sell video chips, but it's not looking too good. Frankly after the living hell I had to put up with Creative and their crap drivers and hardware, I'm praying that this happens, although from what I'm reading NVidia disbanded the entire group, which was a big mistake in my opinon. They had a tech that made Creative sweat and still does even in it's old age, and could easily gain marketshare in the audio front, but they seem to refuse to compete in that market.

--
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Re:Disappointing Audio by phrasebook · 2004-10-20 01:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

Aside from the encoding/decoding features, doesn't anybody experience terrible 'noise' and feedback through their on-board sound? I've got an ASUS nforce board with horrendous noise from any speaker outs - whenever you move the mouse, see some disk access or use the CPU, there's a noticeable buzzing/hissing sound. Maybe it's cause I mostly use headphones, but I hardly ever see people complain about this. With a SB Live in the PCI slot there's no hiss.

On the other hand I have a ThinkPad R50 with nice clean on-board sound, no hiss at all. Is this preventable or is it just bad design?

Nvidia is closed sourced by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 23:37 · Score: 2, Informative

Unfortunately, nvidia drivers are closed sourced, the nvidia's drivers source codes are not available. Only some buggy binaries :((

Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed by swordboy · 2004-10-19 23:37 · Score: 2, Insightful

Now that gigabit is a given (even laptops now come with it entry level), why isn't there a flexible Linux distro that I can store on my router? In this respect, I could save lots of cash by eliminating the need for local storage on, say, a media box to stick under the TV.

HELLO LINUX WORLD?

This is the killer app!

--

Life is the leading cause of death in America.

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed by DrSkwid · 2004-10-19 23:44 · Score: 4, Informative

try harder :

http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html

http://www.ltsp.org/

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed by catch23 · 2004-10-20 00:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yeah the only one I see is the knoppix one. And the first link is just a page of more links, however most of the links don't help the parent post much. We're looking for a distro for network booting, or at least a cd-image that would make it super-easy to setup. (both sides, the nfs-root side, and the client side)

What if I got debian on my router? and now I want to have another computer minus the hard drive? Those links don't make it seem *easy* for us users that just want to make it work. I've done it before after reading lots of how-to documents, but I think someone could create a set of shell scripts to help us all out....
Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed by pboulang · 2004-10-20 02:18 · Score: 2, Informative

10 seconds.
2 to bring up firefox and go to SourceForge
3 to type in "Diskless workstation" in the search box
5 to scan the results and find this project.
Oh lookie, you want the server to be debian? Amazingly enough, there is a link.

--
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed

Devil's advocate..... by BobSutan · 2004-10-19 23:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

I just read the preview at HardOCP and they did bring up a good point.

"The nForce4 is really little more than an nForce3, but with a much deeper feature set. Of course SLI will likely be the big selling point this year...hopefully. I say "hopefully," because thinking back on the nForce3 Ultra launch, we saw many moons between the nForce3 reference board and actual retail samples from motherboard makers. Not to belittle all of the progress that has made it into the new nForce4 feature sets, but I have a feeling that those goodies will not be selling many nForce4 retail motherboards, at least not this year."

There you go. When will they be available, and how big of an impact is SLI going to be in the coming months for gamers? However, when you think about it the NF4 is being sold to gamers in general and only a small percentage will be able to afford the dual 6800s to populate these boards like they were in tended, in SLI. Looking back at 3dfx's version of SLI and how few of the folks in the communitiy actually used it, I fear this will just be a rehash of a good idea that is prohibitively expensive for most. If this turns out to be the case, NVidia could have just wasted a lot of money on a useless feature. And if that is true, lets hope they've got better monetary reserves that 3dfx did. Then again I don't think that'll be a problem for NVidia.

--
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"

Re:Devil's advocate..... by Mostly+Monkey · 2004-10-20 00:14 · Score: 2, Insightful

I could see someone purchasing a single 6800 then after the price drops buying another for SLI on the cheap to get the speed of the new model cards that are coming out for $$$. I have to say that it looks like a pretty smart move from Nvidia to influence people to buy another Nvidia based card in the future.

--
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
Re:Devil's advocate..... by MarkVVV · 2004-10-20 02:18 · Score: 2, Interesting

What about dual 6600GTs ? They're selling for ~ US$ 210,00, but by the time nForce4 SLI hit the stores they will be costing ~ 180,00

550 watts hey... by Amiga+Lover · 2004-10-19 23:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

How long until an entry level machine needs 3 phase power, 16GB ram, terabyte hard drives and networking quick enough to stream the entire iTMS all at once... (don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)

Re:550 watts hey... by mccalli · 2004-10-19 23:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today
The best way to cure this, I find, is to go and buy one. Not emulate, actually go and fetch the hardware you're reminiscing about from eBay.
I have a 48k Spectrum, a C64, then some newer and still vaguely useful machines like an Atari ST (dedicated MIDI box) and an SE/30. Try actually using them for real, and you'll soon go scurrying back to your platform-de-jour remembering how hard it was to make these things do anything useful.
Of course, it was fun and might still be fun, but on the whole the computing past is nice to visit but you wouldn't want to live there.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:550 watts hey... by Amiga+Lover · 2004-10-20 00:05 · Score: 2, Interesting

That's just what I've been doing with a new purchase, a Mac Plus. I also have a classic II and a couple of C64s I drag out from time to time.

Using them for real brings a real link between the "god how did we live like this" and the "wow - this thing can do THAT". It's a good base to touch occasionally. Web browsing on the classic is pretty bad. I couldn't use it for the imaging I do daily, and it doesn't have a hope of playing an MP3. It could play the equivalent .wav, but couldn't actually store it on the 40MB drive inside :). On the other hand IRC, wordprocessing and web serving is well within its capabilities.

It's just reminiscing in the end though. Looking back at the "wow" at how different it was, in the same way looking forward and extrapolating leads to the same kind of "wow".

Story Typo by Shinglor · 2004-10-19 23:39 · Score: 5, Informative

support for Serial ATA 3 Gigabytes/second hard drives

It's Serial ATA II which is 3 Gigabits/second. That's just the interface speed, I doubt we'll be seeing drives that fast on the desktop in the near future.

Re:Story Typo by pjrc · 2004-10-20 02:35 · Score: 5, Informative

To make things even more confusing, the Serial ATA II Specification actually is about adding a bunch of features, not the increase in speed from 1.5 to 3.0 Gb/s.
These features include as backplane support with higher voltages (FR4 fiberglass insulation of circuit boards is more lossy at GHz bitrates than plastic used in the cables), port multipliers (connecting several drives), port selector (redundant communication channels), native command queuing and other features mostly targeted at the high end server market.
The 3 Gb/s (gigabits/sec) speed was actually part of the original 1.0a spec. The speeds 1.5 Gb/s, 3.0 Gb/s and 6.0 Gb/s are refered to as "Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3".
So it's natural to confuse "Gen 2" as mentioned in the 1.0a spec with the revision "II" spec which actually adds features and not increased speed.

--
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools

Economies of scale by Space+cowboy · 2004-10-19 23:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

The [grin] at the end of 'Is this too much to ask' was supposed to be an indicator that I realise it's not the most common of requests...

OTOH, I don't think *my* data is any more or less valuable to me than X's data is to X. How many 'Joe Public's are going to "throw away" one of their two disks to run raid-1 ? Very few I suspect. Most people will go with the raid-0 approach, if they use raid at all, and one raid-0 disk dying is a bad thing, even if it's one of their two 80G drives.

If you don't think that many people will use raid at all, then you have to question why it's there at all, and then you would have a point. I think nvidea would have done some market research on that, though.

So, actually I think it's a valid point - the size of the array isn't important. The reliability is, and that's independent of size.

Simon.

--
Physicists get Hadrons!

Drivers by MBMarduk · 2004-10-19 23:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've been avoiding nForce chipsets on mobos because of their supposedly binary-only and/or non-existant/reverse-engineered drivers for Linux. I'm confused. Does all the hardware on an nForce work with Linux nowadays? Are the drivers OSS or closed like their video ones? Are all even available?

Re:Drivers by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-20 00:17 · Score: 4, Informative

The video is a GeForce and supported by the stock X nv driver. The audio is an Intel ICH compliant device and will work with both ALSA and OSS. The network is supported with the forcedeth driver, which was reversed from the binary nVidia driver. It works well, but may not support the Gigabit speeds on the nForce4 yet. The RAID controller and other fancy gee-gaws is anyones guess.

ActiveArmor by Gaima · 2004-10-20 00:23 · Score: 3, Informative

We noted CPU utilization rates between 10-15% for nForce4 with ActiveArmor enabled versus 70-80% with the feature turned off (as you'd get on nForce3 250Gb).

What the ?!

Hmm, our PIII 800 firewall firewalls 30 people, over 1x 2Mb ADSL (USB), and 1x 1Mb SDSL (ethernet), with 6 IPSEC VPNs and doesn't even use 10-15% CPU!
Sounds like NVIDIA's packet inspection code needs some work :)

Re:ActiveArmor by Professeur+Shadoko · 2004-10-20 01:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

Well, the motherboard as an integrated gigabit port. You'd expect them to try the firewall with a ~1Gb/s traffic.

Re:New mod by keilun · 2004-10-20 00:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

...according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!

Actually, if you read the article, it mentions that normal power conditions are capable of handling SLI for GeForceFX 6800 and 6800GT. The 550-watt specification is only for dual GeForceFX 6800 Ultras.

Re:SLI Downgrade? by Gentlewhisper · 2004-10-20 00:37 · Score: 3, Informative

Anyone else notice that SLI has gone from 16 and 8 PCIE channels to 8 and 8? Also, the chipset only appears to support 20 channels total, so my hope for a 16 and 16 specialist board looks fairly unlikely.

This happens because most of today's graphics cards can barely saturate the bandwidth of 8 lanes, let alone 16.

Taking the example of AGP, so we do have AGP 8X interfaces, but how many AGP 8X cards do you see? Not many. Just because this new gee zee PCI-e interface is available doesn't mean the graphics card industry will magically find a way to use up all that bandwidth. It still takes a couple generations before they can catch up.

--
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!

550 Watts = Bills by Bruha · 2004-10-20 00:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

If the computer industry does not get it's act together with high power usage they will begin to see a decline in these power systems sales. Running 450 watt systems can cost hundreds of dollars a year in extra costs in electricity. For this reason me and the wife are now looking into Mac solutions for standard work stuff and SFF pc's with 200 watt PS's to cut down on the electric bills. In fact it's just not the wattage pull you have to worry about. These systems are now putting off so much heat it puts strain on your home AC systems having to recool off the house as the heat spreads. I've seriously have considered a dryer hose hooked up to the PSU output fan and pipe it out the house.

Re:550 Watts = Bills by fr2asbury · 2004-10-20 02:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

Now, just because a PSU can put out 550 Watts, and just because a system needs a PSU that can put out 550 Watts, does not mean that a system is constantly drawing 550 Watts. A computer's energy consumption is variable depending on what you're asking the system to do at the time. If you're expecting to play DOOM 3, while encoding and burning DVDs 24/7 then maybe you'll max out the power and you will end up paying for that full 550W. Otherwise, there'll probably be long periods of time where the system is sitting idle or doing relatively light tasks and not drawing much power at all.
Running a computer with a 550W PSU is not the same as constantly running a 550W lightbulb.

Unclear -- Ultra and SLI available for 754? by IronChefMorimoto · 2004-10-20 01:46 · Score: 2, Informative

I only had time to read Anandtech's preview this morning for the nForce4 chipsets, and I wasn't sure that the Ultra and SLI chipsets would be made available for Socket 754 A64 CPUs.

I checked Nvidia's website for information on this, and I found tech specs for each chipset:

nForce4 - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041014863476.html
nForce4 Ultra - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015990644.html
nForce4 SLI - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015917263.html

As you can see -- no specifics on the socket support. I'm wondering if this will be at the discretion of the motherboard manufacturers. My hope is that Nvidia will encourage both Socket 754 and Socket 939 variants of the motherboards with these chipsets.

I'm an owner of a Socket 754 CPU, and I know that a lot of friends invested money as early adopters of the A64 CPU in these Socket 754 platforms. I unloaded nearly $375 for my Socket 754 A64 before AMD started cutting prices and introducing the early, and very expensive, Socket 939 CPUs.

That's an investment that I can't just shirk off in order to take advantage of a much less expensive chipset/motherboard upgrade for, say, $125 for a top tier nForce4 motherboard (just guessing at the pricing here -- don't take it literally).

IronChefMorimoto

Nforce3 IDE problems... by freelunch · 2004-10-20 02:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

I have been beating the bushes hard looking for the best Athlon 64/socket 939 MB combo for Linux.

The nforce3 apparently suffers from some IDE problems and a bug report has been filed.

I am currently leaning towards the MSI K8T Neo2 FIR.

I would like to hear about Linux on nforce4...

Also, this site seems to be giving hardware reviews under Linux a go. Any other good Linux-centric hardare sites?

Re:What is PCI Express ? by Shinglor · 2004-10-20 02:48 · Score: 2, Funny

And what the crap is a "motherboard"?

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-20 03:02 · Score: 2, Interesting

You're talking out of your arse:

2. Raid 0 is completely worthless. Waste of money, waste of harddrive space.

How the hell does RAID0 (striped disks) waste harddrive space? If you use e.g., 2x80GB in a RAID0 setup you get, surprise, 160GB of space! RAID1, mirror uses n disks of size m to get a redundant virtual disk of size m. RAID4 dedicates 1 disk to store the XOR parity. RAID5 uses distributed parity across disks. Both RAID4 and RAID5 'waste' (if you consider that waste) 1 disk.

3. onboard sound is a gimmick,

The nforce2 chipset can do Dolby Digital encoding in hardware, how's that a gimmick? Too bad they pulled it out for the nforce4.

Linux software raid is faster then anything else out there (realy IT IS)

You're again talking out of your ass. The Linux md driver is acceptably fast for simple RAID0 and RAID1 setups, and that's about it. Oh, and the venerable ccd driver found in the BSDs is still a bit faster, btw. Now try doing RAID5 in software and you'll soon realize that hardware raid (real hardware raid, like 3ware's) pays off in the end.

Buy hardware that properly supports Linux. Video cards can be forgivable because you have no choice, but you do have a choice for motherboards.

You have no choice? Since when? If you don't need the latest and greatest you can always get a low end Radeon or a Matrox card with open source drivers (yes, even 3D support). Taint your kernel if you want, I do have choice and my choice is not give nvidia a cent.

No soundstorm! by d_jedi · 2004-10-20 03:03 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well, just looks like nVidia lost my sale..

--
I am the maverick of Slashdot

20-lane PCI-E? Ho-hum.... by NerveGas · 2004-10-20 03:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

20 lanes of PCI-E, with 16 of those used for the PCI-E slot? That's the same that everyone else has been churning out. If they really want people to buy their SLI cards, why don't they produce a chipset with higher interconnectivity, so they can put two x16 slots on the board for the SLI cards, and still have a few left over for the peripherals?

steve

--
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.

50 of 230 comments (clear)